Life Defined By FourSquare

What do you think about FourSquare and its future in the social media realm? For the last few years I’ve been using FourSquare – checking in at various spots as I live my daily life. I like being able to check in at a location with a photo, and post it simultaneously on Facebook. Frankly, it is the main way I handle status updates on Facebook. If it weren’t for FourSquare and Instagram, I would almost never post anything to Facebook and my friends would completely lose track of me!

I’ve found it fascinating to look at the picture of my life that FourSquare provides when I look back at my history of check-ins. There’s no hiding from the data. In a way, it is a form of ethnographic research that allows you to identify the patterns in someone’s life (mine in this case). Although the data in no way gives you a complete picture, it does give you some clear themes with which to work.

For example, here’s what FourSquare has to say about my life:

• Is it more important to be the “mayor” of your company, or president? I am currently Mayor of Starbucks, Chapel Hill Quest Center (my daughter’s martial arts studio), Jennings (my company), Philip’s House (my friend Philip White) and Dan’s Mountain Retreat.
• In the last six months, the top places I’ve checked in include: Starbucks (near my home), Starbucks (near my office), Jennings (my office), Raleigh-Durham Airport and Chapel Hill Quest Center.
• The category of businesses that I’ve visited the most include: Medical Centers, Coffee Shops, Airports, Hotels, and American Restaurants. That says a lot. There’s my professional life in a snapshot.
• Over the last 6 months I’ve checked in at 11 different airports. This shows that I’ve done a good job of curtailing my travel.
• I’ve checked-in at Raleigh-Durham International Airport 82 times overall; 22 times in the last 6 months.
• I’ve checked-in at Boston Logan Airport 43 times.
• My caffeine habit has led me to check in at the Starbucks near my home 443 times over the last 3 years.
• PF Changs is the restaurant where I have checked in the most with 121 visits since joining FourSquare. The good news is that if I am at PF Changs, it means I am with my family! I take that as a good sign. It is one of our special places for dinner – particularly on Sunday nights when the stress of a new week can start creeping in. Changs tends to help us fend off the stress.

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New Podcast Interview: Healthcare Social Media

A year ago I met Brett Doucette at the SHSMD conference in Pheonix, Arizona. At the time, Brett was a web content and social media specialist for Phoenix Children’s Hospital. On the side, Brett serves on the adjunct faculty of Ashford University. He contacted me a couple of weeks ago asking if I would record podcast with him for his class on Healthcare Social Media. If you knew Brett, you’d understand why I was happy to help him out. He’s a great guy and a top notch marketer.

Today Brett emailed me a link to the podcast that now resides on YouTube. As long as it is already out there, and Brett invested the time in producing it, I decided I would share it in this forum. (I apologize for the audio quality but it was a phone interview…) Here are some of the questions we covered during the interview:

1) Tell me what role you play with social media.

2) Specific to healthcare, what eHealth trends have you most paid attention to?

3) Again specific to healthcare, what strategies would you employ to build and engage an audience?

4) What do you think is the future of social media in healthcare?

5) Are there any disadvantages of using social media when communicating with patients?

6) What advice or tips would you give to students that are using/will use social media at their workplace?

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Walking the Self-Promotion Tightrope

There are more vehicles than ever for promoting an organization’s services. In my case, a healthcare marketing firm – in your case we might be talking about a hospital or a medical practice. Yet marketing an organization has become more challenging than ever and requires a nimble touch. Here’s what I mean:

• Blogs are great for reaching an audience, for positioning a company as a thought leader, and for providing valuable information to prospective clients, customers or patients. But the “selling” on a blog by nature needs to be very soft. If you are constantly promoting your company and selling your services, your blog has essentially become a website and will quickly lose its relevance. This is true of my blog and it is true of hospital blogs. Being a resource for your readers should be your first priority. The art of using a blog as a marketing tools comes in the way you are able to weave in information about your services (wellness programs, etc) without compromising the value of the blog as a resource.
• Twitter is another great tool for promoting your brand and your expertise within a specific industry (healthcare or healthcare marketing, for example). But those people who are constantly selling on Twitter are missing the point and eventually alienate followers. As with blogs, the selling on Twitter needs to be subtle.
• I love LinkedIn Groups. They provide a great forum for networking and establishing a firm’s expertise. Thought leaders flourish on LinkedIn by leading and participating in discussions. But I am turned off when people use more overt sales tactics on LinkedIn Groups and in group discussions. It just doesn’t seem appropriate for the venue. That’s my bias.

You get the idea. These tools require subtlety and patience when it comes to promoting a business. And people don’t assume, just because you are active in all of these forums, that you are hungry to add new clients, customers or patients. It is an interesting phenomenon. As an example, I was speaking at a healthcare marketing conference in Boston earlier this year. At the end of my keynote address, several marketers from area hospitals came up to talk to me. Each one asked a version of this question: “Is your company open to taking on new hospital clients?” The reality is, people don’t automatically assume that a company is looking to expand or grow. Even though I am constantly doing things that I hope will give people the message that Jennings is looking to add new healthcare clients, it is not obvious. And that’s because the tools I’m using aren’t directly asking them to consider hiring my firm. In fact, much of my engagement on these platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc) never involves mentioning my company.

That’s why it is still so important to integrate conventional marketing tactics into the overall marketing strategy. Each platform, whether it is conventional or digital, is unique. Some are more appropriate for “passive selling” while others lend themselves to “active selling.” A more traditional channel like direct mail allows an organization to be more direct in the way it sells its services in a manner that is highly appropriate. It may not break through the clutter, but that’s the challenge you face with any marketing tactic.

My message is to put a great deal of thought into how you use each medium. Most social media platforms are not designed for active selling. They are there for you to build community and engage followers. Hopefully you’ll use that platforms to create brand ambassadors who can go out into the world and advocate on behalf of your brand. It is also important to recognize that social media tactics need to be integrated with traditional marketing tools to form a complete marketing communications program.

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Aimia Identifies Six Distinct Social Media Personas

It is common knowledge that not everyone active in the realm of social media participates in the same way. Some access their accounts daily and interact with brand campaign initiatives on a consistent basis while others only browse for brief periods of time before disengaging. Whichever the case, Aimia, a global leader in loyalty management, has published a recent study (pdf download) that analyzed and categorized the different types of social media users on the web. In their research brief, Staring at the Sun: Identifying, Understanding and Influencing Social Media Users, Aimia has developed a segmentation model describing six distinct social media personas which may be useful for healthcare marketers interested in engaging specific types of social media users.

The following 6 personas comprising the entire U.S. adult population ages 18 or older:

No Shows (41% of US population) – least involved with social media, if at all; infrequently engage in online commerce.

Newcomers (15%) – passive users of a single social media network, primarily to enhance offline relationships

Onlookers (16%) – observe others via social channels on a regular basis, but share almost no personal information

Cliquers (6%) – active users of one network; influential among their small group of friends and family

Mix-n-Minglers (19%) – those who regularly share and interact with a diverse group of connections via social media

Sparks (3%) – most active and deeply engaged users of social media; will serve as enthusiastic online ambassadors for their favorite brands

Doug Rozen, lead author of the report and Senior Vice President at Aimia, was quoted in The Sacramento Bee describing the benefit that this data brings to marketers:

“Marketers often struggle to understand the true motivations and purchase intent behind customers’ social media activity. Proper segmentation allows marketers to appropriately identify, understand and influence customers through social channels.” (Source: The Sacramento Bee)

Aimia’s segmentation is based on two primary emotional drivers behind social media participation. One is trust. The other is control. According to Rozen,

“The more trust a consumer places in social media networks and their connections, the more likely they are to actively participate whereas the more control a consumer perceives over their social media activity, the more likely they are to engage with a wider variety of social media networks.” (Source: The Sacramento Bee)

Aimia has touched on a subject that should be very useful to hospital marketers hoping to better understand specific segments of their overall audience. As I am fond of saying, the day of the one-size-fits-all marketing solution is gone. (Did it ever really exist, or was that just bad marketing?) We are not communicating with a homogeneous audience. Even within specific demographic groups, there are psychographic variances that are important to understand. So understanding how people vary in their use of social media seems fundamental to developing any strategy for consumer engagement (or physician engagement).

What do you think? Has Aimia hit the mark by distinguishing and analyzing distinct social media personas? Is this information helpful to you? To read the original article from The Sacramento Bee, click here.

To access the complete report and infographic of Aimia’s study, “Staring at the Sun,” click, here. Below is the infographic from Aimia.

(Post written by Dan Dunlop with Charles Ramsey, Jennings Healthcare Marketing Intern and Wake Forest University student)

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Chris Boyer’s Social Media ROI Rag Reprised

My friend Chris Boyer is the Director of Digital Marketing & Communications for Inova Health System based in the Northern Virginia & Washington DC area. He is a healthcare social media thought leader and a great guy. In this video, he sings the “Social Media ROI Rag” at the 2012 Connecting Healthcare & Social Media Conference in New York City (#hcsmNY on twitter) on May 17, 2012. The video was recorded by Mike Sevilla, MD of the Family Medicine Rocks website.

This was not Chris’ first performance of the Social Media ROI Rag. I recorded him performing the hit at the 2011 Mayo Ragan Healthcare Social Media Conference. Here’s that video:

Also check out the following sites:
http://connectinghcsm.com
http://www.christopherboyer.com
http://twitter.com/chrisboyer
http://FamilyMedicineRocks.com

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Online Course Examines The Potential Of Mobile Devices For Health, May 23 – June 20

One of the social media and digital health communication thought leaders that I follow closely is Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM, an Assistant Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine in the Health Communication Program. Lisa teaches Online Consumer Health, Social Media and Health, and Digital Strategies for Health Communication. Recently I learned through Twitter that beginning May 23rd, Lisa is leading an online course on Mobile Health Design. Here’s the course abstract:

Mobile health (mHealth) is a growing area of importance as many health organizations have or are thinking about creating apps. This online course examines the impact and potential of mobile devices for health at a national and global level. Using design methodologies, students will conceptualize and design health apps that incorporate evidence-based guidelines and capitalize on the unique capabilities of smartphones and tablets.

This 4-week online course is a mixture of lecture, discussion and skill-based exercises. Guest lecturers will bring diverse expertise and perspectives to course material. During the course, students will have the opportunity to work in a team to design a health app for a real health organization, using the techniques covered in class.

Both healthcare and public health professionals and current Tufts University PHPD students are invited to enroll. All course activities will be implemented using Adobe Connect and Google+ Hangouts.

The course will examine:

• trends in the adoption and use of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets;
• how design incorporates the mobility, portability, and input/output capabilities of mobile devices;
• how healthcare consumers locate health apps and decide to download and try them;
• how people use health apps and why they sustain or abandon use;
• studies of health benefits, with a focus on how apps educate, connect, track, and remind;
• techniques for designing, evaluating, and monitoring the use of health apps.

Guest Lecturers

Lisa will bring in several guest lecturers. Tara Montgomery, Director of Health Partnerships & Impact at Consumer Reports, will present the course case study. Troy Oldroyd, who serves as the VP of Technology for Alliance Health Networks, Inc. will guest lecture on their experiences developing apps for their online health communities. John Mangano, vice president at comScore where he leads the Healthcare practice, will present on his insights into how patients and health care providers use and interact with the internet and how that activity ultimately turns into doctor visits and treatment, developed through viewing the online activity of over 1 million Americans.

Team Project

Students will work in small teams to design a weight loss app for Consumer Reports using techniques emphasized during the course. Teams will develop an app name and concept statement, define benefits of the app, justify design choices using research evidence, develop personas and conduct a competitive analysis to inform design, create simple wireframes for the app, and develop a product marketing plan. Creativity and innovation as well as consumer appeal, usability, and impact will be emphasized. Students will use Google+ Hangouts to collaborate.

Dates & Location

The course will take place between May 23 and June 20, 2012. Individual class sessions will take place between 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. on Monday and Wednesday with an additional session each week for teams.  The course will be conducted entirely online using Adobe Connect and Google+ Hangouts. http://mobilehealthdesign.wordpress.com/

Enrollment

The course is open to current Tufts University PHPD  students for credit, as well as to healthcare and public health professionals. Total enrollment will be limited to 20.

Health professionals may enroll by submitting a completed registration form to the Tufts University Registrar.  Registration costs $1000 on or before April 18th and $1200 before May 23rd. Tufts affiliates and alumni may enroll at the discounted price of $1000.

Contact information for Lisa: Email Lisa, read her blog, or follow her on Twitter @lisagualtieri.

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Are We There Yet? The Healthcare Social Media Conundrum

My question is: When will we reach the point where the majority of marketing and communications professionals within healthcare understand and use social media to advance their organization’s business goals? I’m not talking specifically about marketing departments. This applies to people involved in physician relations, referring physician marketing, physician and employee recruitment, and so much more. Through marketing conferences, webinars and industry publications, healthcare marketers have received a barrage of information about the relevance of social media to their professional lives. However, I’m not sure that this same communication has reached other parts of the healthcare organization with the same level of intensity and impact. It amazes me that this remains an uphill battle.

A week ago I attended the Physician Strategies Summit, produced by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists. It was an exceptional conference. The attendees seemed eager to learn and actively engaged the speakers with great questions. And several of the presentations were superb.

The conference is largely attended by professionals who work in the physician relations arena, rather than traditional service line or institutional marketers. One of the things that surprised me (why am I ever surprised?) was the relatively small number of individuals tweeting from the Summit. (I’ve grown accustomed to seeing conference attendees with electronic devices in hand.) I know that the number of people tweeting is not the best measure of social media adoption or sophistication, but it does seem to be an indicator that these professionals may not have traveled as far down the social media adoption continuum as some others. While I was keeping track, I noted 17 people contributing tweets or retweets during the sessions. However, of those, only a handful were actual conference attendees. The others were people following the Twitter stream long distance. Below is a snapshot of the Twitter analytics from the the end of Day Two of the conference:

Below is a screen shot of a TweetReach report showing data for the 50 most recent tweets at the time of the report (Monday, Feb 20, 10am). It tells a similar story: very few people tweeting during the sessions.

I don’t know the answer to my initial question, and I acknowledge that social media is not the silver bullet for marketers in our industry. But social media platforms, integrated with traditional marketing tools, can allow for a level of engagement not previously achieved through old school marketing tactics alone. We are now several years into this communications revolution. And every time I think I’ve seen my last Social Media 101 presentation (good riddance), I find that I have wrongly assessed the state of our industry, and Social Media 101 is still relevant.

Of course, as I write this, I am preparing to lead a Social Media 101 workshop for a gathering of dentists in North Carolina. As I’ve noted in at least one prior blog post, I have a dental phobia so this should be really interesting. What will it be like facing an entire room full of dentists? Perhaps they fear social media as much as I fear being in the dentist’s chair! I look forward to welcoming them to the world of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so much more! The world of consumer engagement!

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Final Thoughts & Photos from Mayo Ragan

With the prevalence of social media in my life, I make a lot of professional friends that I rarely get to see in person. Often I will know someone online for two or three years before I actually connect with them in real life (IRL). That one of the reason I love attending national conference like Mayo Ragan Health Care Social Media Summit this week. It gave me a chance to connect with several of my professional friends that I had never met IRL. They included people like (consider this a shout out!) Jamie Verkamp (@jamieverkamp), Dan Hinmon (@HiveDan), Howard Luks, MD (@hjluks), Ryan Squire (@RyanSquire), Robert West (@westr), among others. I also got to connect with people that I follow online but had never met in person: @RichmondDoc, @SeattleMamaDoc, @MarkRaganCEO, and @ReedSmith. And of course, I got to reconnect with old friends like ukelele strumming Chris Boyer (@ChrisBoyer) and healthcare attorney extraordinaire David Harlow (@HealthBlawg).

The Summit was an extraordinary event. What made it special was the inclusion of patients and physicians. Too often health care marketing professionals meet and there’s not a patient or physician to be found. In my opinion, the patient should always be in the foreground as we discuss how we market, and why we market. And the physician is too often left out of the equation. If you want to figure out how to include physicians in your social media marketing, a great place to start is by listening to a group of physicians who’ve done it already. Those are things that Mayo Ragan brought to the table that were of immense value.

I’ll wrap up by sharing a few more photos from the event. Enjoy!

Healthy Snack

Wendy Sue Swanson, MD (@SeattleMamaDoc)

Physician Panel

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Day 2 Recap: Mayo Ragan Social Media Summit

There were elements of this day that left me breathless. Literally. This is what healthcare communicators need. Patient panels. Physician panels. Singing presenters. Pediatrician bloggers. Does it get any better than that?

One highlight of Day Two of the Mayo Ragan Health Care Social Media Summit was definitely the patient panel. The panel was titled “The power of the e-patient.” Katherine Leon and Laura Haywood-Cory spoke powerfully about their experiences as survivors of spontaneous coronary artery dissections (SCAD), and their efforts to network with and organize other women who had survived SCAD. In the end, their efforts lead to patient initiated research (a new buzz phrase) at Mayo Clinic. This is a remarkable story about the patient’s ability to impact the research agenda. If you’d like to read more about this, there’s an excellent Wall Street Journal article titled “When Patients Band Together.” Every conference like this should find a way to put the patient in the foreground! Congratulations to the folks behind the Mayo Ragan gathering who had the vision to make this happen.

I had been waiting in anticipation to see Wendy Sue Swanson, MD (@seattlemamadoc) present. She was amazing. One of her most important messages was the value of social media as a set of tools for LISTENING. Yes, listening. It is not just about spewing information. It is not advertising. We can use these tools to learn more about the constituents we serve. The audience was captivated by Dr. Swanson and gave her a standing ovation! Here’s a brief taste of the reaction on Twitter:

Another highlight was my friend Chris Boyer playing ukelele and singing his social media ROI rag at the end of his presentation. Here’s Chris Boyer’s social media music video (while you watch this, please remember that Chris was a math major):

Finally, yesterday I published a list of 20 people you should meet while attending the conference (Mayo Ragan Health Care Social Media Summit). Well, here are a few more folks you might want to meet today!

• @sarahbethRN – Sarah Beth Cowherd
• @FMDGirl – Kari Ulrich
• @ks_austin – Kristine Austin
• @NinaGWalsh – Nina Walsh
• @TexasGirl11 – Melissa Underwood
• @ambersmith – Amber Smith

It’s been a great gathering. My thanks to every at Mayo Clinic and Ragan Communications for making this possible.

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What Can Healthcare Marketers Learn on Twitter?

I am advocating that Twitter is a wonderful professional development tool for healthcare marketers and communicators. To make that point, I’m sharing within this post some of the tidbits shared on Twitter by our peers over a one hour period on Wednesday, October 5, 2011. This is just a tiny snapshot of all of the content shared by way of tweets. However, it should give you a great feel for the depth and variety of healthcare content shared on Twitter. The tweets are important, but the links they provide are even more important. The tweets are usually stepping stones to more information and much greater detail. In my estimation, Twitter is one of the best ways to quickly and efficiently keep abreast of developments in our field.

Healthcare3dot0 11:54am via CoTweet New post from @TMasnik “Patient-Interactive Technology” How tech is improving engagement & quality of care cot.ag/q5CJkq #hcsm

EyeInfo 11:48am via SocialOomph  Elevate position in #search just by being #social? Be “Searchial” searchialmarketing.com#hcm#doctors

healthblawg 11:47am via TweetDeck  #HealthCare #SocialMedia: An Introduction to Engaging Intelligently and Legally –10/25 #webinarbit.ly/nGAjbt Tell a friend #hcsm

HSPH_CCPE 11:30am via HootSuite 10 IT initiatives your hospital should undertake in 2012 – http://ht.ly/6O1AY#HealthIT#healthcare

FranklinTweets 11:29am via Timely App Implications of the new facebook on #hcmktg and #hcsmawe.sm/5WQ25

ishmpr 11:25am via HootSuite  RT @iowahospital: Speaker Charles Falls: The 1990s are over and so is the one-organization, one-website world #iha2011am

DigMedCom 11:21am via Timely App  Hospital E-Marketing awe.sm/5TXRO The brand is not the physical building, it’s the people that make a brand come to life.

medcitynews 11:20am via twitterfeed  Duke University and Verizon partner on new health IT initiative bit.ly/ruiZNm

ThrivingKids 11:18am via TweetDeck  Finding value in the medical home model: bit.ly/omPXeV

BradJobling 11:18am via Visibli  iPads in the Operating Room: Are these apps and uses more hype than reality? #hcsmhttp://j.mp/ore5Q3

UbiBill 11:17am via HootSuite  Good vid on #hcsm policy @EdBennett shared on his blog. Fun & to the point approach to #sm do’s & don’ts: http://ow.ly/6OeIG

PhysiciansPract 11:15am via TweetDeck  #Doctor’s phone app tallies breast cancer risk (@delawareonline) bit.ly/opRZn7

blueeyepath 11:07am via Tweet Button  PAST INSIGHT: This Social Network Helps You Find Cheap Health Care (via @GOOD) pbeye.info/4Yx#hcsm#hcmktg#socpharm

blueeyepath 11:06am via Tweet Button  Five Myths About Empowered Patients Or E-Patients pbeye.info/4Yw#hcmktg#epatient#patientsafety#mhealth#hcsm

HANYScomm 11:05am via HootSuite  Patient Motivation a Must for Accountable Care http://ow.ly/6ObV6#aco

StewartGandolf 11:05am via Tweet Button  Hospital Public Relations: When Really Nasty News Hits the Fan healthcaresuccess.com/blog/hospital-… via @HCSuccess

SeattleMamaDoc 11:04am via TweetDeck  “Broadcast Doctors: Practicing Medicine on TV” ~ Dr Cory Franklin trib.in/pjk9Mc via @hrana

MobileHCToday 11:01am via TweetDeck  Missed the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco? Get recap at the What’s Hot@ Health 2.0 page bit.ly/pd80mn#mhealth#healthit

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